It's the age pre-bottle that is important. Once the spirit is in the bottle it doesn't matter how old it is or how long it sits since the maturation is finished. The rarity of this particular whiskey is what makes it so valuable.

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The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. -Richard P. Feynman

Yes and no. Wine will continue to age in the bottle although spirits will not.

Old bottles of spirits do have value (more so the rarer/older they are). Scotch from the 1850s has sold for nearly 30k, although it is still technically only 12 year old scotch.

My point, however, was how would you know that what you're drinking is really what it is supposed to be? I doubt anyone would buy two bottles of 200k scotch to compare them. Again, more of an issue with wine where such fraud has been documented.

Yeah but it's in an airport duty-free shop. Sorry, but that's just a ripoff/free advertising for the distiller. If super-old whisky is your thing, you can get 70-year-old whisky from Glenlivet, put into barrels in 1940: http://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/P-14040.aspx Paying that much for a bottle of anything is just being stupid with your money and/or trying to show off. I can totally understand putting a few hundred for a bottle of truly exceptional wine and even a few thousand for exceptional whisky, but otherwise... eh. The most money I ever paid for a whisky was for a 1978 Signatory Vintage Ardmore (the older brother of this guy: http://www.thewhiskyexchange.com/P-13532.aspx) and that was because it was 1. on sale and 2. for a buddy's wedding. I bought the bottle back in 2007 and I just finished it two weeks ago. $150 spread over four years comes out to about $38 a year, which is a deal.